It is presently received wisdom that the click consonants in various Bantu languages of southern Africa reflect an uptake from a supposedly pre-existing substrate of Khoesan languages. The clicks in the latter very diverse languages are widely assumed to be of longstanding existence, and are postulated as original segments in current reconstructions for certain Khoesan families.

However: this paper reveals the presence throughout the Khoesan language families of click-initial words with a demonstrably Bantu-intrinsic identity. Successive sets are presented, and regularly repeated correlations are identified. Since many of these words have roots reconstructed for Proto-Bantu, it is possible to characterise the pathways by which various clicks have evidently emerged. These formulations even have a predictive power, in that they can in some cases also account for Khoesan words without click counterparts in a Bantu language.

The main discussion suggests various scenarios that might account for this previously unrecognised phenomenon, including the possibility that the various Khoesan language groups have perhaps descended from regional Bantu languages, and are therefore related not only to the latter but also to one another, even if perhaps as cousins rather than as sisters. (There is little evidence to support popular beliefs that the Khoesan languages are ‘ancient’, and that speakers of various early Bantu languages only entered the southern part of Africa in relatively recent times.) Although this paper is largely confined to demonstrating the abstract patterns that suggest these relationships, the evidence nevertheless points towards an actual mechanism likely to have been involved in the generation of clicks in both Bantu and Khoesan languages.

Wider implications of the findings are noted, not only for African linguistics but also for other disciplines such as archaeology and history. Future research directions are identified.

This study discusses perceptions of variation across dialects of Arabic in the Arab world as revealed through a perceptual dialectology map task. On a map of the Arab world, female undergraduate students at Qatar University provided information about boundaries where people speak differently and labels for those boundaries. A correlation analysis of the boundaries showed that participants viewed Arabic dialects as constituting five major dialect groups: the Maghreb, Egypt and Sudan, the Levant, the Gulf, and Somalia. A closer analysis of the content of the labels revealed variation in terms of principal (Goffman 1981) on whom they draw in their judgments, the latter being either individual, regional (intermediate) or wide-scope generic. This analysis not only identifies more granularity in the concept of principal, it also quantifies the different kinds of principal and identifies statistical relationships between them, the labels, and the boundaries.

For decades, many linguists have framed the study of language in terms of a language faculty, a specialized cognitive ‘organ’ unique to humans.  In the last decade, even the most stalwart proponents of this view have come to acknowledge the existence of other factors in the organization of human languages. In this talk, I will concentrate on two of these factors, embodiment and competition, drawing examples from the morphology of spoken and signed languages. Neither is unique to language, nor especially human or cognitive in nature.  Their role in the structuring of languages points to a new research paradigm in the study of language, in which no single factor is privileged and the importance of any one of them is gauged only by the insights it provided, not by its uniqueness to language.

Mass surveillance is only possible with the help of smart computer algorithms. Whenever text data is monitored by machines, methods from computational linguistics come into play. The main goal is to automatically filter and identify content that points to certain attitudes or behavioral dispositions viewed as a threat to security. When monitoring online data, the task is even more complicated.  Since people are not usually required to provide their real identity in cyberspace, the tracing of identities through language features ("writeprint") is another challenge for computational linguistics at the service of the intelligence apparatus. Surveillance through language relies on the idea of the expressive function of language: Whenever we utter something, we do not just say something about the world to someone else, we also reveal something about ourselves.

In my talk I will give a critical account of some of the linguistic methods used to automatically attribute identities such as "extremist", "endangerer", or "potential terrorist" on the basis of text analysis. Starting with an overview of the political, legal, and technical framework of state surveillance measures in Germany, I will discuss core concepts of the surveillance discourse and present examples of how linguistic knowledge can be used to assign identities for the purpose of control. In doing so, I hope to foster a discussion on the logic of surveillance in western democracies and the responsibility of the sciences and humanities.